"I loved it, I just loved it," he said. "I'm going to see what we can do about putting it on up here."

Jenkins was hardly alone in his enthusiasm for John Adams' new opera; many of the patrons who attended the work's world-premiere run at the War Memorial Opera House last month felt similarly. What was striking was the second half of his expostulation.

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Imagine: An impresario, having glimpsed a new work he thought had both artistic value and audience appeal, was toying with the idea of staging it at his own company.

In an ideal world, of course, there would be nothing noteworthy about this. But the world of contemporary opera has not been in an ideal state -- or even a particularly healthy one -- for a very long time.

For decades now, the pattern has gone more like this: An opera company, spurred on either by a particular dramatic idea or some generalized sense of wanting to do what's right, commissions a new work from a composer of greater or lesser renown. An initial run is scheduled, perhaps followed (especially if there are co-commissioners) by a second production elsewhere.

The world premiere comes off with lots of fanfare, and for a week or two, all eyes are on the company giving the premiere. Critics fly in from throughout the United States and Europe and proffer their opinions. Then the run ends and the opera is never heard again.

That's been the scenario for most operas premiered in this country over the past quarter century and more, from John Corigliano's "The Ghosts of Versailles," which famously ended a commissioning drought at New York's Metropolitan Opera, to Lotfi Mansouri's San Francisco Opera commissions, Conrad Susa's "Dangerous Liaisons" and André Previn's "Streetcar Named Desire." But if you look around the American operatic scene today, you can see the glimmer of something new, something that hasn't been in evidence for years. You can see an operatic repertoire beginning to sprout.

What you see are operas being put on by companies that had nothing to do with their creation, but that are interested in presenting them for the same reasons they put on the works of Mozart or Verdi or Strauss -- because they think audiences will appreciate them. And to a new extent, they may be right.

"I think that there is a huge change in the way our audiences are looking at contemporary opera," Jenkins says. "Most of the time, it's really hard to turn those tickets. But we are succeeding, I think, in convincing subscribers that new operas are interesting, not unpleasant experiences that they have to live through. Thank God for that."

Leading the charge into repertoire status is "Dead Man Walking," Heggie's treatment of Sister Helen Prejean's autobiographical meditation on the death penalty. Since its 2000 premiere in San Francisco, Heggie's maiden opera has been revived and newly staged throughout the world, with a string of more than a dozen productions scheduled in houses from Cincinnati to Calgary to Adelaide to Dresden.

That track record is an extreme case, but there are other operas too that seem to be gaining a toehold. Mark Adamo's "Little Women" has been staged and restaged repeatedly since its 1998 premiere in Houston, including productions at the New York City Opera, Minnesota Opera and Opera Pacific. "Florencia en el Amazonas," composer Daniel Catán's operatic version of Gabriel García Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," has been enthusiastically received in Houston, Seattle and Los Angeles.

And it isn't just recent operas that have reaped the benefits of some companies' new willingness to look beyond the obvious repertoire choices. Adams' "Nixon in China" was a famous Cinderella figure in the years following its 1987 world premiere -- highly regarded and often discussed but never actually performed. Now that's changing too. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis unveiled a new production of the work last summer, revived this year at the Minnesota Opera; the Portland (Oregon) Opera has the piece scheduled for March and April 2006.

What these companies and others like them have figured out is that there are reasons to program recent operas that go beyond the eclat of a world premiere, reasons like timeliness, artistic resilience and simple audience appeal.

"If the ideas are good enough and they're recognizable to audiences, then these operas will create a response," says David Gockley, general director-designate of the San Francisco Opera.

" 'Little Women,' for instance, is very much part of our cultural ethos, and 'Dead Man Walking' struck a chord, given the issue of capital punishment. Thematically and economically and artistically, these things add up to create a critical mass that makes these pieces producible."

Gockley knows whereof he speaks, because the Houston Grand Opera, where he served as general director for more than 30 years, has been the leading incubator of these operas. "Nixon," "Florencia," "Little Women" and "The End of the Affair" all had their world premieres there. So did such operas as Sir Michael Tippett's "New Year," Philip Glass' "Akhnaten" and Meredith Monk's ravishing and still unrevived "Atlas."

This is not the first time we've seen this kind of feedback loop in the operatic world, in which success breeds runaway success. In 1927, "Jonny Spielt Auf" ("Johnny Strikes Up"), Ernst Krenek's breathlessly topical "jazz opera," took Europe by storm, its Leipzig, Germany, premiere giving way to no fewer than 42 productions worldwide in its first year. Nor is it the first time a body of new opera has coalesced around an evident concern with thematic relevance and artistic accessibility. In the late 1950s and early '60s, a handful of American operas, many premiered at the New York City Opera, touched on particularly American subjects.

They were led by "Susannah," Carlisle Floyd's evergreen maiden effort that transported the Apocrypha story of Susannah and the elders to the mountain cabins and revival tents of Appalachia. Others included Robert Ward's "The Crucible" (revived this fall at Opera San Jose), Jack Beeson's "Lizzie Borden" and Douglas Moore's "Ballad of Baby Doe."

But that was half a century ago, and in the interim new operas have had to face the stupid and pointless trial by fire of the all-or-nothing world premiere. One after another they take the stage, with no choice but to dazzle the first time out or else slink away.

That is no way to nurture an art form that is, let's face it, in difficult straits. Opera, like any other creative art, grows and develops gradually, through careful oversight and through the strengthening of connections that come when an entire body of work by countless creators -- not just a single high-profile project backed by the prestige of a single organization -- is brought to fruition.

That's why the faint signs of an entire body of new opera coming into being are so encouraging -- more encouraging, in fact, than the success or failure of any individual opera. It's too early to tell whether "Doctor Atomic" or "The End of the Affair" will be long with us, and in the long view, it doesn't much matter. What counts is that opera itself continues to breathe, grow and mutate according to its own internal needs.

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